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May marks the month for Amplify 2016 in beautiful Tampa Bay! Donata and I will be packing our bags and flying in from across the pond to attend as many sessions as possible and of course bring you all a sneak-peak of what the future of Digital Analytics has to hold in terms of customer journey data and pathing! While Donata has already detailed the importance of customer journey data and how it is pivotal in shaping your digital marketing strategy (click hear to read the fantastic blog: http://ibm.co/26Mc3TS ), I wanted to share with you all... [More]

What is a Customer Journey? "Think of the customer journey as a roadmap detailing how a customer becomes aware of your brand, their interactions with your brand - and beyond."* An average household in the UK owns 7.4 different internet devices**. People no longer interact with brands and businesses by coming directly to the website only, often an interaction is a mix of different channels & devices. Customers get frustrated if certain functions or features are missing when they switch from one device to another (e.g. desktop to mobile... [More]

The first thing I always tell a client looking for insight on their web traffic is to focus on your business goals. This is especially hard to do when analytics applications spit tons of data out, in a variety of reports with names that sound very important. Let me be blunt about this: the truth is that data will not matter unless it can help you move the needle for your business. In digital analytics this means metrics AND traffic need to be aligned with business goals in order to drive organizational action. To get there, you need to start... [More]

Today's blog comes from Paul Nangle, a Senior Solutions Professional for IBM Digital Analytics. He's been kind enough to let us post his blog on his behalf as we think it's a very important part of your digital analytics platform - the utilizing digital analytics expertise from the vendor you buy your service from or a supplemental industry consultant. Well that's enough from me, read the blog below and please let us know your thoughts in the comments section! Buying a Digital Analytics tool is only part of the solution.... [More]

The inspiration for this post came through a moment of serendipity while enjoying a drink around my neighbour's pool. I was introduced to a family friend who we quickly worked out happened to also be an IBM Digital Analytics customer. It's always fascinating to hear what customers have to say and in this case I posed the question, "What business challenges are you struggling to answer?" To give you some context, this person was heading up Social Media for a business in the retail sector. The challenge faced was how to show ROI from all the... [More]

Inspiration for this week's Hidden Gem hit me while listening to Simply Red's hit from the 1980's, Money's too tight to mention. It's the start of a new financial year for many and that means budgets are getting locked down so the last thing you want is to be whacked in the face with a whopping overage bill for your analytics software. This week I'll show you how to keep an eye on your server calls and avoid any nasty overage bills arriving in the post. First let's have a quick recap on what server calls are all about. IBM Digital Analytics is... [More]

Inspiration for this week's Hidden Gem comes from a crackin' noughties hit by Fatboy Slim, Right Here, Right Now. We're talking about real time data and how to get it into your dashboards to create insightful reports. There are a number of dashboards that Digital Analytics provides out of the box, but I haven't come across a customer yet that didn't want to customize these for their own business. And rightly so, if you're not getting your hands dirty slicing and dicing data you're going to get left behind by the competition. I'm going to... [More]

Congratulations, your new campaign has gone live after months of planning. All that hard work you put into your digital marketing strategy is finally about to pay off and you eagerly anticipate some amazing results along with the accolades and beefy pay raise from your boss. The next morning you log into Digital Analytics and go straight to the marketing programs report. But wait, what's this? No data, how can there be no data?? Before you hit the PANIC button take a moment to check out this week's hidden gem, the Invalid Marketing Programs... [More]

It's that time of year, folks. The time where we take an inventory of our year and see what we've done, what we're proud of, what we're not and what we promise to get better about. Don't worry though, this post isn't going to make you, or me feel any worse about the holiday cheer we all enjoyed, but I hope they are five easy things for the novice or intermediate digital analyst to implement in their 2016 digital analytics reporting. To boot, I'm going to use some of the blogs we've done this year. Here goes! 1) Standard SEO Reporting: If you... [More]

Let me kick off this week's Hidden Gems with a little number from Basement Jaxx… Red alert! Red alert! It's a catastrophe But don't worry.....Don't panic That's right, we're talking about Alerts this week, where to find them, what to set and who to send them to. Alerts are an oft-neglected feature in IBM Digital Analytics which can help to save your bacon when things go wrong on your website. The inspiration for this blog came from a couple of customers that I've been working with who accidentally knocked off some of their tags during a... [More]

Welcome to the second in the series of Hidden Gems where we delve into some of those often neglected aspects of IBM Digital Analytics. This week I'll be giving you a rundown of how to use Forecast Metrics to visualise how your KPIs are performing against your targets. Now some of you will already have established targets for your KPIs but if you don't now is the time to jump across to one of my favourite analytics gurus, Avinash Kaushik, and have a read of this blog where he discusses identifying targets on step 4. Ok, got those targets ready... [More]

This is the first in a mini series of posts that I'll do on a few of those often neglected reports in IBM Digital Analytics that can really turn up some great insight for your business. On several recent occasions I've had the feedback from DA customers that they feel like they don't get all the potential value out of the system. If you fall into this category I hope that the next few blog posts will help turn that around for you. The Forms report is a cunning little fellow that automatically tracks every form on your website by reading the... [More]

The latest innovation in IBM's Marketing Cloud is called UBX (Universal Behaviour Exchange) and it's available to customers and business partners right now. So what exactly is UBX and how can it help me? The marketing speak says "UBX makes it easier for marketers to design and deliver remarkable customer experiences". Coming from a techie background this description was far to fluffy for my liking to me so let me give you my take on it. I like to think of UBX as a pipe that can share customer data between different end points. It does NOT store... [More]

I talk to our customers constantly and hear the same challenges brought up again and again. "We know the tool is powerful. But we don't know how to leverage that power." "We want to do more, but we don't know how." These are legitimate issues and challenges, but sometimes it's worse, and less legitimate. This happens when a user blames the tool. "The tool is not doing what I want." "I could do this with my old tool, why can't I do this with my new tool?" When I hear this critique I must tread lightly, but it reminds me of a guy I used to play... [More]